Leviathan has exactly the same plot as Deep Star Six, a film released in January. Both movies are about a station at the bottom of the ocean menaced by a sea monster that attacks the crew members one by one.

Is there something in the collective unconscious that fears big, ugly things that emerge from the ocean floor? Perhaps. Or could it be that two production companies had the idea for ripping off Alien at the same time?

Whereas Deep Star Six was a bouncy exercise in B-movie silliness, Leviathan comes equipped with some A-movie trappings. It’s got some actors, for starters, and a more impressive set design. The basic idea is slightly more clever: The crew of a mining station discovers the hull of a Soviet ship resting on the sea floor. They investigate.

A couple of the crew decide to drink from the ship’s still-intact vodka supply. Bad idea. This causes, as the doctor (Richard Crenna) puts it, “Some sort of genetic aberration,” and the afflicted mutate into big ugly slimy things that want to kill.

The response of the guy in charge (Peter Weller, Robocop) is to fire up all the power tools, zip the bodies in plastic, and set ‘em adrift. Unfortunately, he doesn’t see the spare limb that gets sheared off and left behind, like a demonic leg of lamb. When it reconstitutes itself, things really shake loose.

Some of the other crew members include Hector Elizondo, Ernie Hudson, Lisa Eilbacher, and Daniel Stern. A decent enough ensemble, but with very little to do except wait around to get slimed. Also, there’s Amanda Pays, a luscious British actress (from the “Max Headroom” TV show), who is the resident fitness expert. This means the filmmakers must find excuses for her to jog around in tight sweat clothes. Which they do.

Director is George P. Cosmatos, best known as the man who guided, or endured, Sylvester Stallone in Rambo II and Cobra. Cosmatos clearly has his heart in action sequences, and Leviathan gives him a few to play with. Unfortunately, there’s nothing else going on, and the movie stiffs out long before it’s over. Lloyd Bridges, where are you when we need you?

First published in the Herald, March 16, 1989

This film is no relation to the 2012 release labeled “best of the year” by Cinema Scope…or is it? I haven’t seen the other Leviathan, so I suppose I really can’t say.

Now that we’ve gotten the definitive films about Vietnam out of the way—movies that deal with the Vietnam War itself as a phenomenon, such as The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now, Platoon, and Full Metal Jacket—it’s time for the genre film to move in. Thus in Good Morning, Vietnam, we see the sketch comedy set in Saigon; in Off Limits, it’s the formula cop movie.

The cops are McGriff (Willem Dafoe) and Perkins (Gregory Hines); according to the formula, one is white, one is black. They’re patrolling the seediest streets of Saigon in 1968, as part of a special Army investigation unit, when they detect a pattern in a series of prostitute killings.

As it turns out, the suspect list includes some high-ranking officers in the American services, which means that McGriff and Perkins had best chill the investigation or risk losing their jobs, or worse. Naturally, they continue, trying to find both the killer and “some (bleeping) meaning” to concentrate on in the madness around them.

Director and co-screenwriter Christopher Crowe creates a hellish environment for his violent heroes, all dirty rooms and bloody corpses. The Americans have contempt for their South Vietnamese allies, and the contempt is reciprocal. The only oasis is a church where the cops meet a nun (Amanda Pays) who helps them on the trail of the killer.

In whodunit terms, Off Limits is a bit clumsy. You can see the real culprit coming from way down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and when the explanation does arrive, it renders the movie’s most memorable scene inexplicable.

That scene has the cops confronting their prime suspect, a crazed officer (Scott Glenn) who nearly tops Robert Duvall in Apocalypse Now for scary insanity. Glenn takes them up in a helicopter and begins to heave Viet Cong out the door, as a prelude to his own reckless action. It’s a startling scene.

The movie has a few of them. Even when it seems to be falling apart, Off Limits does have some brutal power, and it’s gritty enough to make you want to take a shower after watching it.

What it lacks is chemistry. Dafoe, who was so memorable as the Christ-like sergeant in Platoon, has a withdrawn, pinched quality, and it doesn’t mesh with Hines’ more open style. Fred Ward is just right as their superior, who can’t believe these guys are expending this much energy on a case involving murdered prostitutes, a case that nobody cares about anyway. He can’t see that’s exactly why they’re doing it.

First published in the Herald, March 1988

The generic title didn’t help, either. And by the way: Amanda Pays—least likely movie nun ever? Still, the whole thing sounds just intriguing enough to take another look sometime.

While the end credits of Oxford Blues roll, we get to watch the hero (Rob Lowe), dressed in various changes of clothing, strutting his stuff in front of a full-length mirror. It’s an ironically appropriate ending for the film: a sequence of pure, ain’t-I-cute self-admiration. It may as well be undisguised here, because that’s what the whole movie is about.

There’s nothing but adolescent smugness in this story of a Las Vegas doorman who winds up at Oxford. He cheats his way there because he worships Lady Victoria (Amanda Pays), a member of the royal family and a regular in scandal-sheet newspapers.

Once in England, he alienates almost everyone with his irresponsible behavior—everyone except fellow American Rona (Ally Sheedy, from WarGames) and his roommate Geordie (Julian Firth). However, he does have a talent: He can row, and that makes him desirable to the Oxford sculling squad.

As for Lady Victoria, she’s engaged to a snooty Brit (Julian Sands), but one look at Rob Lowe and she practically wrestles him down into the royal bedchamber.

After running roughshod over everyone for most of the film, Lowe finds the true meaning of comradeship and comes through for the Oxford crew at the end. Surprise, surprise.

We’re supposed to be impressed by the change in the lad from opportunistic cad to unselfish team player, but about all you can feel is irritated at this shallow creep, particularly given Rob Lowe’s one-note performance.

It’s not all Lowe’s fault. Actually, based on the evidence of The Hotel New Hampshire, he could be an amusing leading man, given some good direction. But in Oxford Blues, he poses and postures, all in the latest fab clothes. Considering that his good looks are almost mannequin-like already, Lowe is coming dangerously close to parodying himself.

As I was watching the movie, I kept thinking about what a good fashion commercial it would make. And it turns out that writer-director Robert Boris did cut his teeth as a director of TV commercials before writing screenplays (which include Some Kind of Hero and Dr. Detroit). It figures—the film is all surface, full of people posturing and spouting dialogue, but never behaving like human beings.

Like a commercial, that surface just zips right along, not allowing time for characterization. The director doesn’t seem to know what he’s doing – the hero is supposed to be a brat at the beginning of the film, but we’re encouraged to cheer his every move. Near the end, the Oxford crew extends a hand and asks for his help. He turns them down, and Rona gives him a good talking-to. He insists on thinking of himself only, and the film finally disapproves of his attitude, but the audience, in his corner from the start, was applauding him on. Some kind of hero.

There’s also some tired stereotyping of British and American cultural differences. You know: stuffiness vs. rowdiness, cool vs. hot. This stuff is getting as stale as those stand-up comedians who point out the humorous differences between New York and L.A.

Anyway, Oxford Blues is the latest of the quick-fix movies in which doses of sugar are doled out for instant energy. For the preview audience that watched it last week, this seemed to be enough. But believe it: This movie, just like its hero, is a cheat.

Does the first movie of the new year carry a promise of what is to come? If so, fasten your seat belts for a loopy ’87. The Kindred is here, and it’s so bad you can almost smell it.

It’s 90 minutes of nonsense about a scientific experiment gone awry, which is the way experiments almost always go in this genre. An esteemed scientist (Kim Hunter), on her deathbed, tells her scientist son (David Allen Brooks) about some weird work she’d been doing in her isolated seaside home.

Then she dies, and Brooks and his research associates go out to the old house to poke around and reconstruct his mother’s experiments, even though she’d asked him to destroy everything. Once there, these people are the last to discover—the audience gets hip to it immediately—that there is a creepy, gooey, malicious monster hiding under the rotting floorboards, and that this monster is intent on pulverizing all these nice young people.

So the movie turns into an old dark house with a scary thing loose. It pursues this formula so pathetically, and with such a ferocious penchant for cliché, that it frequently elicits hearty laughter, in all the wrong places.

The script is credited to five people, including co-directors Jeffrey Obrow and Stephen Carpenter. One of the credited writers is Joseph Stefano, who many years ago wrote the screenplay of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. If there is anything of Stefano left in The Kindred, it is certainly not recognizable, which he presumably sees as a plus.

In its favor, the film does have an English actress named Amanda Pays, previously lost in the hapless Oxford Blues, who is, by any conservative estimate, an authentic wow. And she turns into a fish near the end of the film.

Otherwise, it’s truly silly. Included is a stupefying watermelon attack, for which the monster somehow lodges itself inside the melon, is placed in the back seat of a car, and zaps the driver; although the victim is supposedly a good friend of the main characters, she is never mentioned again.

Undeniably, the worst moments come for poor Rod Steiger. He is required to say and do many awful things here, but his most terrible scene comes near the end. Steiger, the heavy, wants to preserve the monster for research rather than kill it. He shouts the improbable line, “You call yourself a scientist? Your mother created that thing!” As Steiger stands in a roomful of slime, with a river of goo pouring down on his hat before he gets sucked under the floorboards whence no scientist returns, the actor’s humiliation is palpable, and unpleasant to watch. His face seems to say, My god, I’m an Oscar-winning actor—what crooked road led me here?

One character gazes at him and says, “He looks like a well poisoner.” To which the only possible response is: If you were a serious and much-awarded actor who was ending out his career in this kind of schlock, you’d look a little sour too.

First published in the Herald, January 10, 1987

Along with Oscar-winners Steiger and Hunter, the movie’s got Talia Balsam and a score by David Newman. Sheesh. Somebody must’ve thought The Dorm That Dripped Blood showed a lot of promise.

The Eighties on Film

This is a “diary” in movie reviews: the decade of the 1980s, written by a working critic who slogged through the weird, the cruddy, and even, occasionally, the some kind of wonderful. Some present-day annotation will provide hindsight, but otherwise these are the movies as they appeared: first impressions of Gymkata, the Police Academy pictures, the Stallone-Schwarzenegger-Norris oeuvre at its peak. I’ll start small but will keep a steady flow of reviews coming from my stash of yellowing clippings, even when the results embarrass me.

Here, ladies and gentlemen, are famous titles and oddities you have never freaking heard of. These are the children of Ronald Reagan and Lucinda Dickey. These are the damned. These are the 1980s, as they happened.